The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  “Yes,” said Baskerville.

  She laughed brilliantly. “Then he is doomed, the fool. He may find his way in, but he will never find his way out, not when he can’t see the guiding wands.”

  “He said he could walk his path blindfolded,” Baskerville said doubtfully.

  “And I’m sure he thinks he can,” she said, her lips curving with tigerish amusement. “But he’s never tried it, has he?”

  Baskerville and I both shuddered at the thought, suddenly vivid, of trying to navigate the Grimpen Mire in this white, evasive, endlessly obscuring fog.

  Beryl Garcia saw and smiled. “He will never come out of the Great Grimpen Mire alive,” she said, and in that she was correct.

  * * *

  The fog lifted a little after midnight, and Baskerville and I were able to walk home, each of us tremendously glad for the other’s company. We found Barrymore had returned just as the fog was getting bad and was in the middle of getting ready to go out again—which doubtless contributed to his pleasure in seeing me. He suggested a hot toddy before bed, “to throw off the fog,” and Baskerville and I agreed it sounded like just the thing.

  We talked rather aimlessly; I think we were both too conscious of avoiding the subject of the Grimpen Mire and Stapleton’s probable, horrible fate for real conversation. I was just getting up to go to bed, every muscle now protesting overexertion and cold and damp, when Baskerville said, “Y’know, there’s one thing I cannot for the life of me figure out?”

  “Oh?”

  “Who was the second hell-hound? It can’t have been Barrymore, because I saw very clearly that it was a bitch, but it can’t have been Beryl Garcia, because she was wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy.”

  “Hmm,” I said, and swallowed panic. “Perhaps it was Constance Burry.”

  “Perhaps it was,” he said. There was nothing conscious in his gaze, no sign that he was covertly telling me that he knew both of my secrets. He was genuinely baffled. “Well, goodnight, Doyle.”

  “Goodnight, Sir Henry,” said I, and limped off to bed.

  PART EIGHT

  THE SURREY VAMPIRE

  29

  A New Errand

  I returned to London on the twenty-third. Crow was on the platform to meet me, and we shook hands as effusively as if I’d been gone for years.

  “I missed you,” Crow said, almost indignantly.

  I startled myself by saying, “I missed you, too,” and it was worth it for his smile.

  And it was good to be back in the Baker Street flat, where everything was in the right place and the cook knew how I liked my eggs. I slept well for the first time since I had left for Dartmoor.

  Crow wasted no time in acquainting me with all that had happened in the search for Jack the Ripper in my absence. It was, as he described it, “a series of successive failures,” with every new suspect, seeming so likely at first glance, turning to ashes in the investigators’ hands.

  “And Gregson and Lestrade keep looking at me as if they expect me to pull the murderer out of a hat like a street magician.”

  “They have seen you solve some remarkable cases.”

  “I can’t solve everything,” Crow said. He sounded tired, which was alarming. “I don’t know who killed the Marrs and the Williamsons. I don’t know who’s dismembering women and dumping them in the Thames. And I don’t know who Jack the Ripper is. There are limits to the power of deduction.”

  He was standing by the bow window, staring out at the street, but I thought for once he wasn’t observing the passersby.

  I said, “No one expects you to solve every case you come across.”

  “No, only me,” he said with something that was almost bitterness. “How else can I justify my existence, Doyle? What other reason do I have for not embracing the Consensus?”

  “Is that why you do it? Solve crimes?”

  “Well, no,” he said. “Yes? I mean, it’s the thing that I do, that no one would do if I weren’t here. I suppose … is it?”

  “If you continue your existence, you may yet solve those murders,” I said. “And I think it’s safe to say no one will solve them if you don’t. Scotland Yard is never going to find Jack the Ripper. They don’t even know how to look for him.”

  “I don’t, either,” said Crow.

  “No, but you might figure it out. Which is more than I can say for Gregson, or Abberline, or Swanson, or any of them.”

  Crow turned from the window and smiled suddenly. “You don’t have to persuade me not to throw myself in the Thames, you know.”

  “No?”

  “No. I’m frustrated, not despairing. At least, not despairing to that extent. This case is maddening.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but it’s not your fault you can’t catch him.”

  “How do you make that out?”

  “Well, what can you deduce from the corpses, since that’s the only evidence we’ve got?”

  He gave me a baffled look, but said, “They’re all prostitutes.”

  “Yes, and?”

  “He most likely strangled them before he got his knife out. It’s the only reason I can think of that none of them screamed.”

  “Unless Israel Schwartz really did see Elisabeth Stride and her killer.”

  “What he describes, though, is not a woman who realizes she’s in an alleyway with Jack the Ripper. If she’d known who he was, she would have screamed the place down. And the Ripper’s too canny a lad to let them see the knife.”

  “He strangles them before he cuts them—and he just had bad luck with Stride all the way around. First Israel Schwartz and then the fellow with the pony.”

  “Louis Diemschutz.”

  “Yes. And, of course, that’s assuming Elisabeth Stride was killed by the Ripper in the first place.”

  “You think Catherine Eddowes was a coincidence?”

  I shrugged, inwardly pleased that I’d gotten him to start arguing with me. “It would make sense of why he went back into Whitechapel. He didn’t know Berner Street was full of policemen.”

  Crow thought about that and nodded almost reluctantly. “And Elisabeth Stride was killed by a copycat?”

  “It would explain why the fellow made such a hash of it.”

  “I don’t know, Doyle. It’s an awfully big coincidence.”

  “Oh, I’m not saying it’s true. Just that it’s possible. We don’t have enough evidence to tell us either way. Which is my point. You don’t have enough data to be able to deduce more than the most general attributes of this man. Nobody’s seen him, so that there’s no one to ask questions of, and I think he’s much too smart to let anyone know what he’s doing. Nobody’s sheltering him—although I know there are plenty of theories that say otherwise—and nobody’s working with him. And he’s not a lunatic. He’s probably the sanest man in London.”

  “Certainly he has the coolest head. Your theory is that we can’t catch him?”

  “My theory is that none of the tactics that work on other murderers will work on him. He doesn’t know his victims, he doesn’t have a motive—or at least nothing we recognize as a motive—and unless he has a moment of phenomenally bad luck, he’s not going to register as anything but another Londoner to the people who meet him on the street. Nobody knows they know him.”

  “We need a new set of tactics,” Crow said.

  “Yes, and I haven’t the least idea what they are.”

  Crow’s wings mantled up protectively around him. He said, “All we have to work with are the victims he leaves behind. They all lived and died in the East End, but there’s nothing in that, is there?”

  “Only that the East End is his hunting ground, and the prostitutes who live there are his prey—and that’s most likely because they are so easy to hunt. They are already letting men pay to prey on them. The Ripper and his knife are just an exaggeration of these women’s daily business.”

  Crow’s wings mantled even further, so that he was almost invisible behind them. “And he steals organs,�
�� he said. “Why does he do that? What possible purpose can he have?”

  “He steals them to steal them,” I said. “I would guess he took the uterus twice because it’s the most ‘female’ organ.”

  “And the kidney?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think he took it because it’s so difficult to get at. To prove that he knows what he’s doing.”

  “You think he reads the papers?”

  “Everyone in London either reads the papers or hears them read. Or at the very least hears them talked about. He has to know that that’s the big debate, and of course he wants to weigh in. He botched the uterus that second time, so that he had to do something really difficult—which, given how fast he was working and in what little light, that actually was.”

  “Do you get the feeling,” I said—hesitantly, because this was one of those ideas that had a horrible sort of plausibility in the middle of the night but looked ridiculous during the day—“that he’s looking for something?”

  “Looking for what?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think he knows. But the way he rummages around inside their bodies … I don’t know. It’s just one of those ideas—once it occurred to me, I couldn’t get rid of it.”

  “But rummaging around after what? You must have some idea, or it wouldn’t bother you so much.”

  Which, of course, was true. “Well, he’s clearly a man who hates women. You don’t go after someone with a knife like that unless you either hate them personally or hate something about them so fundamental that it can’t be changed. And since we know it wasn’t a personal motive, or the police would have dug it out, it must be fundamental. And given how he poses them, and how he goes after their lower bodies and wombs, it’s their womanhood he hates. But it fascinates him at the same time. He can’t just leave it alone. He’s trying to find the thing he hates and he can’t.”

  Crow said, “That really is bothering you.”

  “It’s such a horrible idea,” I said, knowing it was an inadequate explanation.

  “It’s a theory,” Crow said kindly. “You’ve probably given the matter more thought than he has.”

  “I know,” I said.

  * * *

  On the third night after my return, I went to bed early, still fatigued from my adventures in Dartmoor. I woke, suddenly and completely, some time after midnight, when a voice said in the darkness, “Good morning, Dr. Doyle.”

  I did not have to ask who was there. I did say, stupidly, “How…?”

  There was a cold, chiming laugh. “Mr. Crow did invite me in,” said the Master of the Moriarty Hunt.

  At that moment, Crow began knocking frantically on the door. “Doyle? Doyle! Are you all right? Doyle!”

  “Dr. Doyle is entirely unharmed,” said Master Moriarty, “and will remain that way.”

  “That’s good to hear,” I said. “But if not to harm me, why are you here?”

  Master Moriarty sighed and said, “I need your help.”

  “My help? Are you sure you don’t need Crow’s help?”

  “No,” she said with flat finality. “Mr. Crow cannot help with this.”

  “But I can?”

  “The Master of the Gilbraith Hunt has stolen one of my Chosen. I cannot go in after him, but you can.”

  “You want me to go into a vampiric house after one of your addicts?”

  “Gently, Dr. Doyle,” said Master Moriarty. “I may need you, but I will not tolerate insult.”

  “I spoke no insult, Master Moriarty,” I said. “Any Chosen of yours must be addicted to your blood. But I apologize for my harshness. Still. Is that what you want?”

  “No vampire can touch you,” she reminded me. “And the Gilbraith Hunt isn’t strong enough to turn Isa’s will. He is still my Chosen. They will not be able to stop you.”

  “Is this part of some vampiric skirmish?” I said. Vampiric hunts were always skirmishing with each other, jockeying for power and wealth, and in general human beings were well-advised to stand clear.

  “She has gone too far,” said Master Moriarty. “But that need be no concern of yours. I wish you only to bring Isa out of the vile Gilbraith den.”

  “I don’t see that I can refuse,” I said.

  “Doyle!” said Crow from the other side of the door.

  “I promised,” I said. “And I don’t believe Master Moriarty would ask for my help if she had not exhausted all other avenues. Give me a moment to get dressed, and we can go.”

  Master Moriarty unlocked my door without apparently touching the key and drifted out, much as she must have drifted in. I yanked yesterday’s clothes on and followed her into the sitting room, where she and Crow were glaring at each other like rival cats.

  “Oh, stop it,” I said. “This isn’t a pleasant errand, but it’s not going to harm me.”

  “She could have waited until morning,” said Crow. “You need your sleep.”

  I thought of the many nights when Crow kept me up, excitedly explaining his new theory about the Ripper or stewing over his current case, but did not say so. “Don’t look to a vampire for consideration,” I said and bowed slightly to Master Moriarty. “Shall we?”

  “I have a hansom waiting,” she said, and I followed her out into the cold, wet night.

  * * *

  The Gilbraith Hunt also kept its seat in Lambeth, the telltale red windows glowing luridly over a tobacconist’s shop. “I will wait here,” said Master Moriarty when the hansom stopped, the first time either of us had spoken since she gave the address to the cabbie. “You are looking for Isa Whitney.”

  “Right,” I said.

  I climbed the stairs, narrow and reeking rather of tomcat, and pushed open the door at the top. The vampiric house was dimly lit, and it was a maze of passages and tiny rooms, each barely big enough for the fainting couch it contained. Of the sixteen such rooms I counted, only five had anyone in them, that paltry number suggesting why Master Gilbraith had done something as dramatic and foolish as trying to steal one of Master Moriarty’s Chosen.

  I asked each of the addicts I found, three men and two women, if he or she either was or knew Isa Whitney. They all said no.

  Then I came to a red baize door, the first actual door I had found in the entire house. Beyond it, presumably, were the Gilbraith vampires, and where the addicts had merely been puzzled to see me, the vampires would be actively displeased. I wanted, badly, to go back to Master Moriarty and tell her Isa Whitney was not here, but I did not think she would believe me. I certainly did not think she would let me go home.

  Then the decision became moot, for a stocky blond vampire opened the door and stared at me in bewilderment.

  “I am looking for Isa Whitney,” I said, before he could ask.

  The blank look I got in return suggested that perhaps Master Gilbraith was not being discriminating enough in her Chosen.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and stepped past him. He did not stop me.

  Behind the red baize door the house became more houselike, with a parlor and a sitting room and closed doors that were probably bedrooms. Before I quite nerved myself to start opening doors at random, I found another, smaller set of rooms with fainting couches. All six of these had an addict on the couch, and I recognized by their waxy complexions that these were Chosen who were near making the transition to vampire kits.

  I asked a young man in a rumpled brown suit, “Are you Isa Whitney?”

  It had been a guess, based on the fact that he looked like a good bourgeois and the others looked like they’d been pulled at random off the streets.

  He opened his eyes (brown starting to sheen gold) and frowned dreamily at me. “Yes. Who are you?” His voice was slow and slurred, but at least he was cognizant enough to understand me.

  “Master Moriarty sent me.”

  His eyes widened. “Master Moriarty?” He started floundering upright. “I didn’t mean to worry her. I wasn’t going to stay long.”

  I knew, as any child knows, the
ability of vampires to beguile their prey. The vampires of London generally had no need to use that ability, as their prey came willingly to them, but it would certainly make it easy for a Master to lure in anyone she wanted to.

  “What o’clock is it?” said Whitney.

  “Nearly three in the morning.”

  “Of what day?”

  “Friday,” I said. “The twenty-seventh of October.”

  “Friday! It can’t be Friday!” He had half risen, but now he sank back onto the couch. “It’s only Wednesday. It has to be Wednesday. Don’t frighten me like that.”

  “I am sorry,” I said, “but it is Friday. Master Moriarty has become very concerned about you.”

  “Oh no,” moaned Isa Whitney.

  “She’s waiting outside in a hansom,” I said, offering a lure of my own, and Whitney made it upright.

  “Give me your arm,” he said. “I can’t worry Kate.”

  I chose not to say any of the things I could have said and simply helped him maintain his balance.

  We were just through the red baize door when Master Gilbraith caught up with us. She was stick thin, with a sharp, rather ratlike face and long red hair that she wore loose like a child or a Burne-Jones painting. “Isa!” she said. “Where are you going? And who is your companion?”

  “Madame,” I said, “I am an emissary from Master Moriarty.”

  Her lip drew back from her upper teeth, making her look even more strikingly ratlike. “Master Moriarty has no right to send her…” She broke off, staring at me in bafflement.

  “Master Moriarty was concerned about Mr. Whitney,” I said. “And Mr. Whitney has indicated that he wishes to leave, which you must acknowledge he has every right to do.”

  Master Gilbraith glowered, but her play had been based on the same principle: until Isa Whitney was actually turned from human to vampire—and he wasn’t quite there yet, although he was close—he could come and go as he pleased, and no hunt had a legal claim on him.

  And Whitney proved he was listening by saying, “I want to leave.”